


swimming around me like impalpable air

by syrupwit



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-20 00:57:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17612399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: Miles and the Walrider, after the asylum.





	swimming around me like impalpable air

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emmawicked](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmawicked/gifts).



The Walrider is drawn to human misery and its remains. It functions best in ghost towns, landfills, abandoned mines -- the sites of massacres and ambushes, mass graves and labor camps. It favors remote truck stops and nameless highways, forests left barren by seasonal fire. It'd probably have a field day on Mount Everest or in one of those high mountain passes where travelers cannibalized each other. Miles doesn't like to think what it would do in a prison.

Miles is drawn to misery too, but not for the same reason. At least, that's what he used to think. Injustice gets Miles' blood boiling, always has -- that's why he got into journalism. He thought he could set things right by sharing the truth. You can't see ugliness if it's in darkness.

Miles doesn't remember much after leaving the asylum. There's a gap in his memory clear from September to January. After that he has flashes of awareness, brief moments when the Walrider let him through: snow falling on a rusted train track, night lights glinting off the back window of a pickup truck, someone lying face-down on a bloody motel floor. He woke up in his apartment in DC, sure he was dead. He managed to discern from the dates on his piled-up mail and the rotting contents of his fridge that he was in fact alive, or something like it.  
  
He knew they couldn't stay there. So did the Walrider. Murkoff had almost killed them both back at Mount Massive. They'd soon be on his trail again. The Walrider allowed him to grab a few possessions -- cash, one of the burner phones he had been stockpiling, a change of clothes -- and then they were off again. It let him surface again once in a while, for longer and longer periods of time. At some point it started being normal for him to be conscious more than he was unconscious. He can't tell why.

A few of Miles' old contacts still don't know he's dead. They tip him off to Murkoff's newest facility: a residential treatment center in Utah. The mission statement says they're saving troubled kids. When Miles first reads that, checking the website in a public library in Iowa, he almost snaps the monitor in half. The air around him darkens before he pulls it together.

The Walrider is not human. From a certain perspective, it's a parasite -- or symbiotic even, co-human. It doesn't feel emotion like Miles does. The truest things it knows are rage and fear. The Walrider doesn't fully grasp what makes Miles so angry, but it echoes the feeling back at him, coils around his hands like snakes of smoke.

They hitchhike and train-hop from Midwest to true West. Miles rests in sheds and empty buildings. He steals food from gas stations and scavenges from dumpsters. The Walrider hovers around him while he sleeps, the fuzzy shadow of its presence almost a comfort in the night. Its hum lulls him to rest. He doesn't know if if it means to protect him or simply can't leave him.

The Walrider isn't human. It can't read Miles' thoughts per se. It talks in blood and violence, action and reaction. Nonetheless, Miles feels a connection with it; nonetheless, when other potential hosts present themselves, the Walrider doesn't choose them over him. For better or for worse, their fates are intertwined.

No one escapes Mount Massive unscathed. Or gets out of there unfucked. One of those. The feelings Miles has started to notice might be the least messed up thing about him, considering that the Walrider is the only entity that he regularly interacts with. There's connection, sure, and stability -- but also a strange protectiveness, as well as an emerging fascination for the Walrider's physical reality, its language, its quirks and habits. Its tang of rot and iron. He's slept with people for years he knew less about. That's as close to love as Miles can get now, maybe.

Which is probably why it freaks him out so much when -- two hours away from the Murkoff place, waking out of a nightmare that left him sweaty and disoriented, limbs tensed at uncomfortable angles -- the Walrider finally speaks to him.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "[Destruction](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54377/destruction)" by Charles Baudelaire, trans. C. F. McIntyre. Specifically, this stanza:
>
>>  
>> 
>> _At my side the Demon writhes forever,_  
>  _Swimming around me like impalpable air;_  
>  _As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever_  
>  _And fills me with an eternal guilty desire._  
> 


End file.
